Trivia / Nosferatu

• Banned in China: Due to "excessive horror", the film was banned in Sweden until 1972. It was also banned in its native Germany for a while when the Nazis took over.
• Completely Different Title: In a particularly bizarre (and ironic, given the original's copyright disputes) example of this trope, an independent German film company released a heavily edited sound version of Nosferatu entitled The Twelfth Hour in 1930. The producers of this version had supposedly received a print of F. W. Murnau's rough cut from Albin Grau, the film's producer, and received permission to reedit it once the copyright disputes were cleared. They not only drastically recut the film but added sound, used alternate takes cut from the theatrical release, changed the character names (again) and even shot new scenes featuring different actors. This version saw release in Germany and a handful of other European countries, with the producers initially marketing it as a completely different movie, but other countries with stricter copyright laws blocked its release.^note Which didn't stop a number of historians from conflating it with the "official" Nosferatu; Twelfth Hour is often listed as an alternate, or even the primary title for Murnau's film in several reference books Decades later, Murnau's estate purchased the rights to The Twelfth Hour, and to date they have blocked any official video release - although it turns up occasionally on television and at classic film festivals.
  • Hong Kong: Undying Corpse
  • Taiwan: Vampire
• Creator Couple: Max Schreck's wife Fanny has a small role as a nurse.
• Creator Killer: Prana Studios was bankrupted by the Stoker family's lawsuits and never produced another film.
• Deleted Scene: Ruth Landshoff claims she filmed a scene where her character flees from Orlok along a beach. It's not in any version of the film, and doesn't appear in the original script either.
• The Foreign Subtitle:
  • France: Nosferatu the Vampire
  • Hungary: Nosferatu: Dracula
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The reason the film still exists. According to The Other Wiki, the studio who made the film was sued by the estate of Bram Stoker, and the courts ordered all copies of the film to be burned. Somehow, one copy slipped through the cracks, and this copy was then duplicated and spread throughout the world. The 'crack' was the United States, which didn't recognize most foreign copyright claims until decades later, by which time the original book was public domain and the claim against the film moot.
• Lying Creator: Studio head Albin Grau claimed that he was inspired to make the film in 1916 when a Serbian farmer told him his father was a vampire. Film historians believe this story was fabricated to sell tickets.
• Missing Episode: The original score was supposedly recorded during a screening, but has been lost. There is however a reconstitution of it as it was played in 1922.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: One scene has Orlok loading up a horse-drawn cart with coffins. He then gets inside one at the top of the coffin stack. Watch as the lid of the coffin moves up to Orlok's coffin (via stop-motion photography) — the horses change position a couple of times.
  • An earlier scene has Hutter climbing into Orlok's horse-drawn carriage. Watching the film closely, you can see the horses wandering off the dirt path on the way back over the hill.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • At the time of release and for many years after, there were rumors that Max Schreck didn't actually exist and was a stage name used by well-known actor Alfred Abel to make his character seem more mysterious. It's often noted that Schreck (German for "terror") is a curiously appropriate name for an actor playing a vampire, which is a pleasant coincidence, but Schreck is also a fairly common German and Dutch surname.
  • It is often reported that the names of characters were changed to avoid copyright disputes with the novel. But the titles actually state that the film is based on the novel, and the name changes seem more just for the sake of relocating the story to Germany - as it was low budget and intended just for German audiences.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The film was nearly lost due to a lawsuit from Bram Stoker's estate over the film blatantly plagiarising Dracula. All but one of the original prints were burned - but that one print ended up in the United States, which refused to recognize foreign copyright claims until well after Dracula entered the public domain and the ruling was rendered void, and thus the film survived.

---